GOP Drafting Panel Puts Final Touches on Platform : Politics: Abortion rights forces are offered a separate resolution respecting ‘honest differences of opinion.’ But lobbyists reject it.

A party platform that provoked outrage among abortion rights advocates but won cheers from conservative activists was given its finishing touches Thursday by a Republican drafting committee.

In the past, the platform has taken a hard line against abortion. Dissenters had hoped that this year’s manifesto would at least acknowledge room for diversity on the issue. They cited the Republican “big tent,” an expression used by Lee Atwater, the late party chairman, to imply that the party wanted the support of those on both sides of the abortion controversy.

Instead, the drafting committee offered abortion rights backers nothing more than a separate resolution, authored by Illinois Rep. Henry J. Hyde, which expressed respect “for honest differences of opinion.” The resolution also invited “all Americans” to “join our party, to support our candidates and consider our platform, which represents the views of mainstream Americans.”

That was good enough for one member of the panel, Charles Summers of Maine.

Summers, who had joined in the futile effort earlier in the week to delete or amend the 1988 platform’s strict ban on abortion, endorsed the platform committee’s resolution, saying: “I do believe this resolution will serve to begin some sort of healing within the party. The underlying strength of the party is the fact that we as Americans, as Republicans, can have a disagreement but at the same time can be members of the same party.”

But in the corridors of the George R. Brown convention center here, abortion rights lobbyists rejected the peace offering as inadequate and pledged that they will try to carry their fight to the convention floor.

“Why would something that isn’t even in the document be a sop to me?” asked Nancy Sternoff, executive director of the National Republican Coalition for Choice, one of the organizations that has been striving to modify or delete the abortion plank.

“This makes pro-choice Republicans like a mistress,” said Ann Stone, head of another abortion rights group, Republicans for Choice. “We disappear whenever it’s convenient.”

Warning that the platform would cost Bush the votes of supporters of abortion rights in November, Stone said: “This document is political suicide. It’s out of touch with the political mainstream.”

But there are real questions whether the abortion rights forces can carry on their fight at the convention, which is expected to approve the platform Monday. To get a minority plank reported to the floor, they would need support from 25% of the 107-member platform committee. And the most they were able to muster for their side on a roll call vote on the abortion issue earlier in the week was 16 votes.

Meanwhile on the right, conservative forces who have been equally active but more successful in lobbying the drafting committee sounded a very different tune.

“Conservatives are very pleased,” said Floyd Brown, head of Citizens United, a 60,000-member grass-roots lobbying organization. “All our issues were covered from tax cuts to spending cuts to pro-life.”

Conservatives also contended that the platform would energize their rank and file for the November election. “I think you can count on our people giving the President their full support,” said William von Raab, co-chair of conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan’s unsuccessful challenge to Bush’s renomination.

Among the successes cited by the Buchanan backers Thursday, as the drafting committee completed its work on the platform by vetting the foreign policy section, was an amendment on trade, which sounded a refrain made familiar by Buchanan himself on the stump against Bush: “In all negotiations concerning trade we will put the interest of America first.”

Buchanan forces also took satisfaction from another amendment which called for “an ongoing review” of foreign aid programs to ensure their effectiveness.

But not everything went the way Buchanan and other conservatives wanted them to go. An attempt to insert language calling for denial of most favored national trading status to China, in contravention of Bush’s own policy, failed.

And a conservative proposal calling for a constitutional test case of the President’s line item veto power was not approved, as The Times incorrectly reported Thursday. But the platform as approved by the drafting committee does give Republican support for the principle of a line item veto and pledges that a Republican Congress would approve it.